"Do you mind if I finish my breakfast?" he said steadily.
The officer glanced at his watch. "I can give you five minutes."
Rupert made a pretence of eating. He managed to swallow a little food. He felt he wanted to remain in this room just a few minutes more. Just a common lodging-house room, that was all, but it seemed now as if the greater part of his life had been passed here.
Here he had worked; here he had really lived, learnt just a little of the meaning of life. Here love had come to him for the first time. It was just as much or even more his home than Blackthorn Farm had been. He swept it with his eyes. But he did not see the common cloth nor the lodging-house breakfast service, the framed text on the wall "Home, Sweet Home," the cheap etching of one of Landseer's pictures, or the coloured print from the Christmas number of the Illustrated London News. He did not see the hideous wallpaper with its green and gold pattern which had long irritated him, nor the well-worn Early-Victorian furniture. He only saw the Ghost of the Things that Had Been. The photograph of Ruby on the bureau, the vase of dead roses, and through the windows one of the turrets of Westminster Abbey.
The officer cleared his throat. "I'm afraid——"
Rupert rose instantly. "Will you call a cab?"
Then, to his own surprise, as much as to the surprise of the two men waiting, he laughed. For, suddenly, the vision of an old four-wheeled cab, a policeman on the box next the driver, and inside a man sitting very close to a plain-clothes officer, rose before his eyes. He had seen this four-wheeled cab and its occupants on Westminster Bridge the day he and Ruby went to the races.
And they had both laughed then at some foolish joke he had made.
And so he laughed again now. "Get a taxi-cab, if you can," he said.
He put on his hat and coat, drew on a pair of gloves. Then, not out of bravado, but prompted by a sentimental whim, perhaps, he drew one of the roses from the vase and placed it in his button-hole.